Background

The CCC’s parent organisation is Students For Liberty (SFL), an American libertarian student organisation linked to right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch.[3]

The CCC received seed funding, and a further $210,296, from SFL.[4] It describes itself as “totally open” to corporate donations.[5]

For the financial year 2016/17, the CCC declared a total income of €3,761,438 from unspecified donations.[6] The organisation has received financial support from consumer goods, energy, manufacturing, digital, healthcare, cryptocurrency and fin-tech industries.[7]

Relationship with the Tobacco Industry

Upon request, JTI declined to disclose what this membership entails and how much financial support is linked to it.[16]

In addition, CCC’s Frederik Roeder contributed to "Regulating Consumers?", a Euractiv Special Report sponsored by JTI for €10,000.[17][18]

Attempt to Discredit WHO and IARC

In September 2018, the CCC has scheduled three strongly biased roundtables to discuss “WHO’s shortcomings in working towards better global public health and how the WHO actively blocks healthier technologies in the area of harm reduction”.[19] The events also condemn the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) assessment of the pesticide glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. None of the invited speakers have public health qualifications.

Affiliations

In addition to being scheduled to speak at the anti-WHO event, the IEA was involved in launching the CCC in April 2017. Christopher Snowdon, the IEA’s “Head of Lifestyle Economics”, featured in the promotional video for the CCC’s launch event.[21]

At its launch event, the CCC disclosed that it “collaborated with” EPICENTER, a free-market think tank collective, set up and funded by the IEA.[22]